The Last King of Africa

Brother Leader, global agitator, anti-imperialist revolutionary, megalomaniacal renegade. The former Libyan leader has been tagged with all these attributes, and then some. Olivier Vallée* walks us through the web of political and economic strategies that drove Muammar Qaddhafi’s vision for the African continent, and probably contributed to the unravelling of the model and the man.

In the second half of the 2000s, Muammar Qaddhafi managed to legitimise nearly 20 years of fighting and political manoeuvring to become one of the African continent’s most influential leaders, acquiring a gravitas that far exceeded that of the country he ruled.

Qaddhafi had been active on the continent since the late 1960s, having sponsored a number of African liberation movements both in Libya’s immediate vicinity and further south, from the National Liberation Front of Chad to the Eritrean Liberation Front, the independence movements in the Portuguese colonies, and the ANC in South Africa.

Far from being a whim, or merely an aspect of its anti-imperialist struggle, the Libyan revolutionary regime’s penchant for African politics was rooted in the tradition of Tripolitanian, Cyrenaican and Fezzan travellers and communities, who migrated back and forth between the Mediterranean coast and sub-Saharan Africa. The Libya of The Green Book may not have offered the continent an alternative model, whether in a symbolic manner as in Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso, or like the model of prosperity promised by Thabo Mbeki’s New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), but it did propose a different vision of society, to be attained by uniting nomadic communities into new strategic formations and forging religious and economic networks.

In 1998, Qaddhafi managed to win some recognition for his African project through the creation of the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD), which included nations from all over the continent, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Chad, Sudan, Somalia, and the Comoros islands among them.

In April 2006, during the Mouloud festival in Timbuktu, the Brother Leader established an ‘association of the tribes of the Great Sahara’ which grouped together the Tuaregs of Algeria, Mali and Niger and was the culmination of a project he’d begun in 2005, at a meeting that took place in the border town of Oubari, where he explicitly pushed the Tuaregs into a united political and military force. He then alternated between posing as a mediator for governments with large Tuareg minorities and stirring up Tuareg rebel movements that often cooperated with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Subsequently, CEN-SAD offered Libya a podium from which to mobilise several African states against the United States and take up anti-imperialist positions. Also, in 2007, the 28 member states of CEN-SAD declared that “they categorically refused the presence of all foreign armed forces on African soil regardless of the reasons behind their deployment”. A similar anti-imperialist stance led the Brotherly Guide to lend his aid to Robert Mugabe in the wake of Western sanctions against Zimbabwe and to refuse to sign up to the UN weapons embargo. When it came to Darfur, Qaddhafi presented himself as a mediator, deeming that the conflict had been overly politicised and fuelled by Western powers “who were more interested in oil than in human rights”. Through these actions, Qaddhafi cast himself as the defender of the “African blood that was being sucked by Western governments and business interests”. These positions culminated in his steadfast stance against the United States Africa Command (US AFRICOM).

Qaddhafi was equally adept at establishing religious networks. He sponsored one of the world’s leading Muslim missionary networks, the World Islamic Call Society (WICS), which sent staffers out to build mosques and provide humanitarian relief. Its missionaries traversed Africa preaching a moderate, Sufi-tinged version of Islam as an alternative to the strict Wahhabism that Saudi Arabia was spreading. The highlight of Qaddhafi’s charm offensive came with a series of so-called “defiance tours” in convoys through West Africa. The WICS staff was drafted to help organise and support the visits. Among their tasks was helping preachers in each country to mobilise the crowds, and arranging meetings between Qaddhafi and the influential tribal and religious leaders in the region.

On 9 May 1997, in violation of the UN embargo on his aircraft moving beyond Libyan airspace, Qaddhafi landed in Kano, Nigeria with 1,000 troops and 1,500 journalists from all over the world to lead a large public gathering in prayer.

With the return of civilian rule in 1999, some Nigerian analysts noted that Pakistan, Libya and Saudi Arabia had financed the Zamfara State, which had been the first state to implement Sharia law. Subsequently, several groups – from the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – used ethnic-religious communities as a cover for their own, sometimes conflicting agendas. Over the course of the following decade, 12 states (of the 36 that make up Nigeria) adopted Sharia law.

Fuelled by the ongoing corruption of local political elites and the influx of outside money, fundamentalism became more overtly violent and political, with movements such as Boko Haram or the armed sects in Niger and Chad gaining a footing. This led to several police stations being set on fire and policemen being killed in northern Nigeria. In the wake of the sectarian murders in Jos in 2010, Qaddhafi’s appeal for the disintegration of the Nigerian federation was considered an outright provocation to the sovereignty of the Nigerian government.

There was thus a direct correlation between Qaddhafi’s religious and foreign policy in Africa, one whose importance increased exponentially until the end of the 2000s, when Libya was recognised by the entire continent. The most evident manifestation of this was when Qaddhafi claimed the title of “King of all African Kings” after assuming the presidency of the African Union. What some dismissed as just another manifestation of his megalomania was also an attempt on his part to bring about a compromise between organised political structures, chieftainships and religious networks, to forge a strategic union that would help the continent acquire an international gravitas.

Indeed, Qaddhafi had made many strides towards turning the moribund Organisation of African Unity into the African Union (AU) in 2002. When his plan for a United States of Africa was rejected by several governments – led by South Africa and Nigeria, the other big powers of the continent – this did not stop the “Brotherly Guide of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, King of all African Kings” (as Qaddhafi insisted on being called after being elected as such by an assembly of traditional African leaders in Benghazi, in August 2008) from continuing to pursue this agenda surreptitiously. He accepted the presidency of the AU in 2009, and thereby set himself up as a mediator and a strategist for wider public policies that would affect the entire continent.

Qaddhafi’s legitimisation as an African leader just before his fall proposed an alternative to the West, and to the historical postcolonial passivity in the wake of the demise of all the great charismatic anti-imperialist leaders, such as Nasser, Lumumba, Nkrumah and Sékou Touré. The arrival of Qaddhafi at the head of the AU appeared to consecrate the most visible instance of his country’s return to the international stage as an economic, political and military force in Africa. In a variety of ways, Qaddhafi tried to break through the external constraints placed upon him as a mediator, king, and president of Africa, and he built a network that temporarily kept him in power while his old French and British friends backed the National Transitional Council of Libya, which aimed to bring about his downfall.

Beyond wanting to change the postcolonial status quo of the AU’s member states, Qaddhafi also sought to gain an audience and public support for himself and his peers in the face of the difficulties he might eventually meet in his country, or when dealing with his neighbours in the Maghreb. It was thanks to its status as a leading African state that in February 2009 Niger asked Libya to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the Tuareg-led conflict raging there. Following the discussions that took place in Sirte in April 2009, with Qaddhafi in attendance in his capacity as both the AU’s president and the chief negotiator of CEN-SAD, all parties present made a solemn commitment to peace. This was made on the conditional terms that the government of Niger release all prisoners detained during the conflict and grant all demobilised militants a cash bonus, which the Brother Leader undertook to pay in order to help with their reintegration into the country’s economic life. A date, 30 June 2009, was mutually agreed upon as the time when all weapons would be officially handed over.

The African trails of a global agitator

Over the course of several decades, Qaddhafi set about becoming the chief catalyst of an anti-imperialist movement in Africa, all the while working behind the scenes to destabilise other African leaders and spark insurrections in their respective countries. The World Revolutionary Centre (WRC) was one of Qaddhafi’s leading organisations in his armed struggle against imperialism. As Stephen Ellis wrote in his book on the Liberian Civil War, The Mask of Anarchy, this base on the outskirts of Benghazi was the equivalent of Harvard or Yale for an entire generation of revolutionaries. Besides undergoing training exercises in weapons and military intelligence in the desert, they were also taught the rudiments of The Green Book. Courses could last from a few weeks to an entire year. One could find Sandinistas from Nicaragua in those camps, alongside other Latin American revolutionaries among whom were members of FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army), but it was African revolutionaries who were the prime beneficiaries of Qaddhafi’s support.

Following President Reagan’s decision to bomb the Brother Leader’s residence in 1986, one of the artisans of Qaddhafi’s revenge against the US had been Charles Taylor, a US citizen but also a Liberian one, who was recently condemned for war atrocities and crimes against humanity. Qaddhafi never stopped arming and financing Taylor, even when the latter was forced out of power in 2003. Laurent Kabila, who overthrew Mobutu in 1997, and Blaise Compaoré, the recently deposed president of Burkina Faso, both attended the WRC. Compaoré also sent troops and weapons provided by Libya (through the airports of Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso) to Taylor during the Liberian Civil War, as well as to the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Through his dissemination of arms, military training and relationships with warlords, Qaddhafi also built a network of vassals that was able to provide him with logistical and political support.

Averse to Western interventions in African conflicts, often presented under the guise of anti-terrorist campaigns, the Libyan regime demonstrated that it was also willing to use arms, even far beyond its borders. From 1997 to 1998, Qaddhafi set up an expeditionary corps in military bases in the Central African Republic and in Gbadolite, in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As late as 2007 one could still find Libyan arms in the hands of a Congolese rebel group, whose leader had been accused of committing war crimes. Those weapons bore the acronym “GSPLAJ”, or “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, the official name of Qaddhafi’s Libya. Libya also aided Idi Amin during his repressive rule in Uganda, and subsequently the latter’s enemy and successor, Yoweri Museveni. The negative consequences of certain Libyan interventions since the 1970s were offset by the way it adapted to the political transformations that took place in countries such as Uganda, but also on the international level.

Before embarking on expeditions throughout the African continent, the Brother Leader recruited loyal affiliates among the nomad Tuaregs who roved around the deserted regions of Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya. These nomads, who had often chafed against central governments in their countries of residence since independence, took refuge en masse in Libya several times in the course of the 1970s and 1980s.

It was the conference of Oubari in 1981 that officially established the relationships between the various political and military Tuareg movements and Libya. Indeed, one of the decisions announced at that conference was the opening of Libyan military training camps to young Tuaregs, with the aim of training them in the use of weapons. This support for the Tuaregs was at the root of Libya’s numerous disagreements with Algeria, Mali and Niger. The Tuaregs in Mali and Niger waged rebellions against their governments during the years 1990 to 1995. One of the chief forces behind these uprisings was the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, whose combatants hailed from groups that had been exiled in Libya and Algeria. Qaddhafi had welcomed these groups, but had also trained their members as front-line combatants to be deployed both in Libya and beyond. It was partly the successors of these initial militants who aided Qaddhafi loyalists in their fight against rebels during the first three months of 2011.

Several of these rebellious Tuareg elements were veterans of the Islamic Legion that Qaddhafi had founded in 1969 with the aim of creating an Islamic state in North Africa, who settled in Libya in 1980 after this legion was disbanded. From 1981 to 1991, Qaddhafi even set up a training camp just for them. Several key figures in Sahelian politics, for example the old Malian rebel chief Ibrahim ag Bahanga – who often found sanctuary in Tripoli – graduated from these camps. Aghali Alambo, the controversial leader of the Niger Movement for Justice, was also often to be found in the Libyan capital, and the southern Libyan cities of Sabha and Ubari, where large numbers of Libyan Tuaregs lived, were also home to many rebels.

These were the recruitment pools that provided the troops that served under General Ali, a Tuareg in charge of Qaddhafi’s southern garrisons. These troops formed the regime’s strategic rear-guard, and many also served as the Brother Leader’s bodyguards. The Tuaregs who belonged to these brigades were similar to privileged mercenaries: they had no blood links to other Libyans, and had seen their influence grow with the controversial arrival of Tuaregs from Mali and Niger, as well as other groups of African fighters.

The financier who came from the desert

Before being overthrown by the National Transitional Council supported by a coalition of non-African countries, Qaddhafi was principally known as either a troublemaker or a high-profile proponent of pan Africanism. But he was also a skilled international businessman, who had long made use of the world of finance to invest the funds from the oil trade, as well as to establish his political and strategic influence on the African continent. One of the countries that contributed the most to Qaddhafi’s fall in 2011 was Qatar, which had nevertheless appealed to Libyan expertise when it came to investing its funds even as late as June 2008. Back then, the two countries had created a common investment fund worth US$2 billion. The project, a joint venture of the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) and the Qatar Investment Authority, was initiated with an agreement that was signed by the Emir of Qatar during a visit to Tripoli. Besides recognising Libya’s experience in the field of sovereign wealth funds, this co-operation marked Qaddhafi’s rapprochement with nations of the Gulf, a reconciliation cut short when Sheikh Hamad become one of the National Transitional Council’s chief financial backers.

One should stress that Qaddhafi did not wait for the sovereign wealth funds to mature before acquiring the Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company (LAFICO) in 1981. This company became his leading tool to finance his African interests. A good chunk of the weapons used in various military adventures was purchased through LAFICO, which had also made several investments in African countries, from Niger all the way to Uganda, since the beginning of the 1990s.

Libya soon became one of the primary investors in Africa through various companies and financial establishments, among them the Libyan Arab African Investment Company (LAAICO), the Libya Africa Portfolio (LAP), and the Sahel-Sahara Bank, which was established in Tripoli in 1998. Between them, these funds managed between US$65 billion and US$75 billion worth of investments in various countries. They also managed all Libyan interests around the world from 2006, when Western sanctions against the country were lifted and the Brother Leader followed the example set by the Gulf countries to better invest his oil revenues. The core of the financial strategies employed in the service of Libya’s political ambitions soon became the LAP, an investment fund created in 2006, whose main objective was to develop and invest capital in profitable ventures to enable the development of various African economies. The LAP took over all the assets of LAAICO, which had sky-rocketed from US$25 million in 1981 to US$1.5 billion in 2006. The LAP soon became a means for Libya to spread its political influence beyond its immediate neighbours. In Kenya, LAAICO acquired the luxury Hotel Regency, while Libya Oil Kenya Limited set up OiLibya gas stations throughout the country with start-up funds provided by the LAP. In 2008, when OiLibya took over Shell’s fields in Ethiopia, it planned a pipeline that would link Eldoret to Uganda, thus providing six countries in the region with processed crude.

Qaddhafi combined short-term operations with ambitious, long-term political intent. Tamoil Africa (now OiLibya), based in Monaco, used funds from the LAP to buy up ExxonMobil stations across the continent. Besides buying Mobil’s 64 stations, it also invested in lubricant factories in Mombasa and the airplane fuel terminals in Mombasa and Nairobi, as well as in depots in Nakuru, Eldoret and Kisumu. Many of Tamoil’s branches, such as those in Kenya and Niger, never turned a direct profit. Instead they gave Qaddhafi an opportunity to grow his influence and assets across the continent. He also used personal loans to African heads of state to achieve similar ends.

Robert Mugabe, who benefited from Libyan endowments and oil shipments to the tune of several hundred million dollars when his country was in the stranglehold of Western sanctions from 2007, was unable to repay that money. Relations between the two countries were apparently tense for a while, but Qaddhafi was ultimately compensated when Mugabe granted him 20 luxurious residences in Zimbabwe as well as shares in public enterprises. Qaddhafi’s support for the Central African Republic and its President, Ange-Félix Patassé, was eventually repaid through shares in the country’s uranium, gold and diamond mines. Qaddhafi thus strengthened his strategic footholds on the continent.

In July 2010, Libya set up a hedge fund in the City of London to capitalise on investment opportunities in Africa. Forty experienced traders were recruited for FM Capital Partners, which was managed by Frédéric Marino, a former employee of Merrill Lynch. The LIA controlled 55 per cent of FM Capital Partners, while Marino and his partners owned the rest. A private equity fund within FM Capital Partners was also established to specialise in the acquisition of shares in African companies. Marino also sought to recruit rich African investors as part of his private equity fund and soon became an advisor to the sovereign wealth funds of various emerging economies, such as Nigeria, Ghana, Angola and Rwanda.

For many years, Libya Oil Holdings financed the exploration for oil fields and production projects in Benin, Sudan and Chad. Many of these initiatives, such as the Kampala-Kigali pipeline or the one between Moanda and Matadi in the DRC, seem to have had very few immediate financial prospects. However, the project for the Kampala-Kigali pipeline was signed in the Ugandan capital in March 2008 by the CEO of Libya Oil Holdings, Ali Shamekh, in the presence of Presidents Qaddhafi, Museveni, Kibaki, Kagame, Nkurunziza and their colleague Abdallah Youssef of the Somali transitional government. Once again, this gave what was supposedly a simple financial transaction an overt political scope and dimension in the region. Along the same lines, the construction of a 140km pipeline linking Muanda to Matadi in the DRC, promised in August 2008, marked Libya’s return to said country.

Libya’s strategic ambitions also targeted the acquisition of land and directly involved CEN-SAD. Beginning in the 2000s, CEN-SAD began working with Libyan investment funds to wage a war over rice production in Africa, which also involved the Chinese. As described by a report issued by the NGO Grain in 2004, after a CEN-SAD conference in Bamako, “Mali’s President, Amadou Toumani Touré, offered up 100,000ha of land within the Office du Niger, Mali’s main rice producing area. Libya, a country flush with petrodollars but lacking in its own food production, effectively runs CEN-SAD and it jumped at the chance . . . Through an arm of its sovereign wealth fund, the Libya Africa Investment Portfolio, Libya signed a deal with Mali giving Libya control over the 100,000ha as part of a larger infrastructure investment project for the area that includes the enlargement of a canal and the improvement of a road. . . Libya, like other Arab countries, is seeking to escape its dependence on corporate-controlled global commodity chains for its food needs by outsourcing food production to other countries.”

The Black Guard

During the final months of the Qaddhafi regime, several members of his inner circle set out to consolidate important relationships in sub-Saharan Africa. A brief glance at the biographies of those who participated in this diplomatic offensive gives an indication of the power they were able to wield: the great reformer Shukri Ghanem was a former head of the OPEC secretariat, a Director of Marketing of Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) and a Chief Advisor at the Ministry of Petroleum in Libya who could, via Tamoil, rely on a network of contacts throughout Africa; Ali Treki, a Libyan diplomat in Muammar Qaddhafi’s government, had strong ties in Francophone Africa; Moussa Koussa, the éminence grise of Libya’s secret services and the powerful Minister for Foreign Affairs, had for a long time been entrusted with negotiations with the AU; Bashir Saleh was Qaddhafi’s irremovable chief of staff and his spokesperson after the pseudo-conferences in Bamako or Bangui; Mohamed Ahmed Al-Sharif, the Secretary of the World Islamic Call Society, had locked down several African cities, including Niamey, where he bought a great deal of the real estate left behind by French interests after the uranium boom; Al Warfalli was the General Manager of the Sahel-Sahara Bank; and Mohammed Madani Al Azari, the Secretary-General of CEN-SAD, was fluent in French and had managed to group the most disparate states into that project of economic and political integration. These personal networks were activated very quickly at the beginning of the regime’s crisis to boost the support that Qaddhafi received from many Muslim and African dignitaries in the wake of the popular uprising against him.

In Bamako, on 19 March 2011, the front set up to protest against what they referred to as a colonial war in Libya organised a march in support of Qaddhafi in front of the Libyan embassy. On 25 March, the Malian coalition that supported the Great Jamahiriya republished anti-US and anti-French slogans in the capital of the old French Sudan. Rumours abounded of mercenaries who had come into the country to fight alongside forces loyal to the Brother Leader. Among the countries cited as sending fighters were Sudan, Niger, Chad and the DRC. There had even been reports of the dreaded Zimbabwean Fifth Brigade having been sent to Tripoli. As it happens, the most active mercenaries at the time were South African. The Libyan regime had long utilised militias recruited from neighbouring countries for internal operations, and also often employed an “African Legion” when it came to foreign operations of the sort that occurred in Sudan, Chad and the Central African Republic. At Bamako, it had been almost impossible for the Malian President to stop Qaddhafi from recruiting auxiliaries once Western aggression began. The skyline of Bamako was suffused with the presence of the Libyan leader and his realisations: the city’s main mosque, television station, a handful of hotels and the “Mouammar el-Kadhafi” administrative precinct, inaugurated by the Libyan leader in 2010 but renamed only months after his fall. The Friendship Hotel, a symbol of the socialist alliance between Nasser and Modibo Keïta, had become a part of LAFICO-Mali’s portfolio. One of the best hotels in the city became the Brother Leader’s HQ and was renovated at a cost of €24 million when the latter pitched his tent there.

During the crisis, the Libyan fighters were assisted by ex-rebels from various African conflicts and from the Serbian wars. According to sources, the multinational OiLibya, which was present throughout Africa, financed the recruitment of these foreign militias, which continued even as the first gunshots were fired in Benghazi.

Chad was also responsible for sending a number of its regular troops to fight against the Libyan rebels. As Pierre Prier, a journalist at Le Figaro emphasised, the leaders of the rebellion accused elite Chadian troops “of getting more and more closely involved with the Libyan military, so much so that they ended up fighting on the front-lines. . . According to Le Figaro’s sources, Chad’s military aid began right at the very start of the rebellion, when a contingent of 300 men was first dispatched. These soldiers, who were drawn from units based in the Central African Republic, and from a military academy, flew to Libya from Abéché and Amdjeress, in the north-east of Chad. The Libyan ambassador to Chad confirmed that these troops had arrived in Sabha, in the south of the country, the location of an important military airbase, which was subsequently bombarded by the planes of the anti-Qaddhafi coalition.”

As French analyst François Dumasy notes, “ever since coming to power, Qaddhafi had always marginalized the army. He had only been a captain when his coup d’état had happened in 1969, and he had never enjoyed much respect among the army’s leading officers.” Faced with the dispersion of Libyan tribes and the uncertainties of Libyan military units, Qaddhafi had long since chosen to keep a “black guard” at his disposal. On the whole, Qaddhafi’s African agenda saw him use these units as a counterweight to oppress local dissidents, and a way to shift the focus away from clashes between his clan and other factions in his country by taking the fight beyond his borders. These efforts were coupled with his ambition to create an Arab and Libyan front against Western imperialism after the dismantling of British and US bases in the Kingdom of Libya. Within this framework, and well before Operation Odyssey Dawn, Qaddhafi had already begun to train mercenaries, warriors and leaders, some of whom, like Blaise Compaoré, were still in power after Qaddhafi himself was not.

What legacy?

The majority of Francophone African presidents of the Sahel and the Atlantic coast were clients of the Brother Leader. The other nations of the continent also knew the value of his contribution to the creation of a minimal management platform for the African continent which could allow it to cope with various wars or other crises. Libya alone contributed 15 per cent of the AU’s budget and financed that organisation’s peacekeeping missions in Darfur and Somalia. If Qaddhafi’s pan African aspirations appeared dangerous, the African heads of state put this into perspective when the Anglo-French coalition attacked Libya. When considered alongside other leading figures such as Charles Taylor or Robert Mugabe, the Brother Leader at least knew how to play the card of progressive politics and national liberation.

It is indisputable that he enjoyed a good reputation among the cadres of the ANC, which Qaddhafi helped to finance during its long years of struggle against apartheid. In return, Nelson Mandela facilitated the end of Libya’s diplomatic isolation in 1999. Still, old bonds of friendship did not prevent South Africa from supporting UN sanctions against Libya in 2011 – but the South African government nevertheless stopped short of calling for Qaddhafi’s ousting. Outside of Libya, the last king of Africa definitely displayed considerable skill at sowing disorder, creating investment opportunities and forming temporary alliances. Yet despite the wars in Darfur and the continuing crises in Somalia and Eritrea, the African continent managed to outpace Libya when it came to internal political changes, and eventually came to prefer Chinese investments to the Brother Leader’s white elephants.

As for the Sahelian nations in the immediate vicinity of Libya, the devaluation of Qaddhafi’s economic, political, social and symbolic capital placed various constraints on the actions and revenues of the Saharan and Sahelian nomads. As a global non-state actor, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has presented itself as a provisional alternative to the decline of the African Sahelian network established by Qaddhafi’s Libya.

* translated by André Naffis-Sahely.

This story features in the new Chronic, an edition in which we ask: what if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities or imaginaries? How does it shift the perception we have of ourselves and how we make life on this continent?

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